In the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) LTE (Long Term Evolution) R8 (Release 8) specification, a downlink sub-frame has a length of 1 ms and includes a control section, i.e. PDCCH (Physical Downlink Control Channel) and a data section, i.e. PDSCH (Physical Downlink Shared Channel), and a structure of the downlink sub-frame is as illustrated in FIG. 1.
Particularly the control section, i.e. PDCCH, in the downlink sub-frame schedules the data section of PDSCH in the sub-frame, that is, a frequency-domain resource, a modulation and coding scheme and other control information used for data transmission of the downlink sub-frame are specified in the PDCCH of the sub-frame.
The inventors have identified during making the invention at least the following problem in the prior art:
A drawback of the prior art lies in that a control section of a sub-frame can only schedule a data section of the sub-frame, which may not be very flexible in some special cases.